s her mother had ever been
elegant and _bien soignee_. But he had shown kindness to her in his
domineering way. He was not quite so illiterate as his accent and his
general air of uncouthness seemed to imply. In his speech, the broad
vowels of the Lancashire dialect were grafted on to the clipped
staccato of a Cockney. He would scoff at anyone who told him that
knives and forks had precise uses, or that table-napkins were not meant
to be tucked under the chin. In England, especially in the provinces,
some men of affairs cultivate these minor defects, deeming them tokens
of bluff honesty, the hall-marks of the self-made; and David Verity
thought, perhaps, that his pretty, well-spoken niece might be trusted
to maintain the social level of his household without any special
effort on his part.

Shocked, almost, at the disloyalty of her thoughts, Iris tried to close
the rift that had opened so unexpectedly.

"It was stupid of me to take you seriously," she said. "You cannot
really mean that Mr. Bulmer wishes to marry me?"

Verity screwed up his features into an amiable grin. He pressed the
tips of his fingers together until the joints bent backward. When he
spoke, the cigar waggled with each syllable.

"I meant it right enough, my lass," he said.

"But, uncle dear----"

"Stop a bit. Listen to me first, an' say your say when I've finished.
Like everybody else, you think I'm a rich man. David Verity, Esquire,
ship-owner, of Linden House an' Exchange Buildings--it looks all right,
don't it--like one of them furrin apples with rosy peel an' a maggot
inside. You're the first I've told about the maggot. Fact is, I'm
broke. Ship-ownin' is rotten nowadays, unless you've lots of capital.
I've lost mine. Unless I get help, an' a thumpin' big slice of it, my
name figures in the _Gazette_. I want fifty thousand pounds, an' oo's
goin' to give it to me? Not the public. They're fed up on shippin'.
They're not so silly as they used to be. I put it to owd Dickey
yesterday, an' 'e said you couldn't raise money in Liverpool to-day to
build a ferry-boat. But 'e said summat else. If you wed 'im, 'e makes
you a partner in the firm of Verity, Bulmer an' Co. See? Wot's wrong
with that? I've done everything for you up to date; now it's your
turn. Simple, isn't it? P'raps I ought to have explained things
differently, but it didn't occur to me you'd hobject to bein' the wife
of a millionaire, even if 'e is a doddrin' ow